Mutate Your Mind

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MonthAugust 2004

So I’ve got a thing about moving stuff. I like to help people move. I don’t like to move myself, there’s a lot of stress in that. Packing, timing, worrying about the new place, etc. But helping other people move, that’s a different story.

I guess it’s because most of my work tends to be basically intellectual… I can spend hours working on an ad and and the end of the day, there’s not much to show for it. Just some text arranged so that it’s not too ugly. And the real work of the ad won’t pay off for quite a while.

Most of my hobbies are like this. The amount of time I might spend designing a web site, fixing a computer, or writing an story doesn’t seem to produce much. Some pixals on a screen. A couple pages of text. Not much changes.

So it’s nice to do things that have a more immediate and tangible pay off. Like moving. Suddenly, someone’s house is empty, and their trailor is full. Or the trailor is empty and the house is full.

It would be nice if the next day job I had was something a little more tangible. Because however productive I may be, it can be hard to really feel all that productive.

On a related note, I moved offices yesterday. It wasn’t a big deal, and it’s nice to be in my new space. My new office is nearly as big as my apartment in Seattle.

On Thursday, September 2nd, for several hours prior to and during George Bush?s re-nomination ceremony, the Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective (BOP-C) will be conducting Orgone operations with several of our Cloudbusters, attempting to suck the fascism from the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden. From an undisclosed location on the Brooklyn waterfront, we will be redirecting the flow of Life Energy above the deadly concentrations of hatred and greed accumulating in midtown Manhattan. If indeed our theories prove correct, it may be possible to reduce the entire convention floor to a quivering Saturnalia. The moans of Love shall ring out across the Land!

A 9-year-old Minnesota girl found a five-legged frog with 23 toes near Stewartville, Minn., according to a report. … Experts say the animals are particularly sensitive to pollutants, which can be absorbed through their skin. Because of that, deformed frogs are considered a sign of environmental problems.

Obviously, this is still in very early planning stages. The basic idea here is to publish spoken word stories and slam poetry on Mperia. There’s a lot to be worked out still.

1. I’d kinda like to do only stories, fiction and creative non-fiction. But I do like the idea of having lots of stuff: interviews, essays, slam and/or spoken word poetry. If I include poetry, I’d like to have another editor dedicated strictly to poetry.

2. I think it would be fun to have perhaps one track of music per issue. But I’m not sure.

3. There’s the matter of recording standards and so forth. One person I talked to about this wants to include music with his submission. Others probably won’t. Should I prohibit music in order to keep the tracks consistent? Or should I try to compile a large amount of music that the voice tracks can be mixed with so that all tracks have music.

4. Will I take text submissions and try to match them with voice talent? Or only take submissions in which the writer does their own reading? Or require writers who don’t want to read themselves to find their own voice talent?

5. Mastering. I don’t really know much about mastering, or how difficult a process this will be. Is it really necessary for a project like this? Is it such a difficult project that no one would volunteer to do this for free?

6. Money and copyright. Ideally, I’d like to offer most of the money from mperia sales to the writers and voice talent. Keep a small percentage for operational costs. Leave the copyrights to the creators, so long as they agree to a Creative Commons license that allows for the mp3s to be freely distributed. There’s the kicker there, though. I’d like to encourage people to share the mp3s once they’ve downloaded them, maybe even link to free mirros of the tracks. Not sure if anyone would go for this, though.

7. “Cover art” would be nice to have for each issue.

There’s a few lit mags that already publish stuff in audio on the web: here are a few. The Corpse also has an audio section (probably the closest thing to what I’d like to do). But I think this will be something different and new. An edgy collection of works by new and newish writers, purely distributed through audio tracks that can be used anyway the listener would like (on an iPod, on a CD, on their computer, etc.).

There are two types of games which provide the most commonly-used gaming metaphors, and those are chess and the playing cards. These are the games most commonly played in the Western world throughout the last five centuries, familiar to any school child: one a game of strategy, the other a game, mostly, of chance. Research indicates, however, that the two systems of gaming may in fact have had a common origin.

The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.

It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. In my heart of hearts I’m with you. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.